abstract, and his philosophy too vague, but that his best work is his
_English Traits_. The _English Traits_ are beyond question very pleasant
reading. It is easy to praise them, easy to commend the author of them.
But I insist on always trying Emerson’s work by the highest standards. I
esteem him too much to try his work by any other. Tried by the highest
standards, and compared with the work of the excellent markers and
recorders of the traits of human life,—of writers like Montaigne, La
Bruyère, Addison,—the _English Traits_ will not stand the comparison.
Emerson’s observation has not the disinterested quality of the
observation of these masters. It is the observation of a man
systematically benevolent, as Hawthorne’s observation in _Our Old Home_
is the work of a man chagrined. Hawthorne’s literary talent is of the
first order. His subjects are generally not to me subjects of the
highest interest; but his literary talent is of the first order, the
finest, I think, which America has yet produced,—finer, by much, than
Emerson’s. Yet _Our Old Home_ is not a masterpiece any more than
_English Traits_. In neither of them is the observer disinterested
enough. The author’s attitude in each of these cases can easily be
understood and defended. Hawthorne was a sensitive man, so situated in
England that he was perpetually in contact with the British Philistine;
and the British Philistine is a trying personage. Emerson’s systematic
benevolence comes from what he himself calls somewhere his ‘persistent
optimism’; and his persistent optimism is the root of his greatness and
the source of his charm. But still let us keep our literary conscience
true, and judge every kind of literary work by the laws really proper to
it. The kind of work attempted in the _English Traits_ and in _Our Old
Home_ is work which cannot be done perfectly with a bias such as that
given by Emerson’s optimism or by Hawthorne’s chagrin. Consequently,
neither _English Traits_ nor _Our Old Home_ is a work of perfection in
its kind.
Not with the Miltons and Grays, not with the Platos and Spinozas, not
with the Swifts and Voltaires, not with the Montaignes and Addisons, can
we rank Emerson. His work of various kinds, when one compares it with
the work done in a corresponding kind by these masters, fails to stand
the comparison. No man could see this clearer than Emerson himself. It
is hard not to feel despondency when we contemplate our failures and
shortcomings: and Emerson, the least self-flattering and the most modest
of men, saw so plainly what was lacking to him that he had his moments
of despondency. ‘Alas, my friend,’ he writes in reply to Carlyle, who
had exhorted him to creative work,—‘Alas, my friend, I can do no such
gay thing as you say. I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low
department of literature,—the reporters; suburban men.’ He deprecated
his friend’s praise; praise ‘generous to a fault,’ he calls it; praise
‘generous to the shaming of me,—cold, fastidious, ebbing person that I
am. Already in a former letter you had said too much good of my poor
little arid book, which is as sand to my eyes. I can only say that I
heartily wish the book were better; and I must try and deserve so much
favour from the kind gods by a bolder and truer living in the months to
come,—such as may perchance one day release and invigorate this cramp
hand of mine. When I see how much work is to be done; what room for a
poet, for any spiritualist, in this great, intelligent, sensual, and
avaricious America,—I lament my fumbling fingers and stammering
tongue.’ Again, as late as 1870, he writes to Carlyle: ‘There is no
example of constancy like yours, and it always stings my stupor into
temporary recovery and wonderful resolution to accept the noble
challenge. But “the strong hours conquer us;” and I am the victim of
miscellany,—miscellany of designs, vast debility, and procrastination.’
The forlorn note belonging to the phrase, ‘vast debility,’ recalls that
saddest and most discouraged of writers, the author of _Obermann_,
Senancour, with whom Emerson has in truth a certain kinship. He has, in
common with Senancour, his pureness, his passion for nature, his single
eye; and here we find him confessing, like Senancour, a sense in himself
of sterility and impotence.
* * * * *
And now I think I have cleared the ground. I have given up to envious
Time as much of Emerson as Time can fairly expect ever to obtain. We
have not in Emerson a great poet, a great writer, a great
philosophy-maker. His relation to us is not that of one of those
personages; yet it is a relation of, I think, even superior importance.
His relation to us is more like that of the Roman Emperor Marcus
Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius is not a great writer, a great
philosophy-maker; he is the friend and aider of those who would live in
the spirit. Emerson is the same. He is the friend and aider of those who
would live in the spirit. All the points in thinking which are necessary
for this purpose he takes; but he does not combine them into a system,
or present them as a regular philosophy. Combined in a system by a man
with the requisite talent for this kind of thing, they would be less
useful than as Emerson gives them to us; and the man with the talent so
to systematise them would be less impressive than Emerson. They do very
well as they now stand;—like ‘boulders,’ as he says;—in ‘paragraphs
incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle.’ In such
sentences his main points recur again and again, and become fixed in the
memory.
We all know them. First and foremost, character. Character is
everything. ‘That which all things tend to educe,—which freedom,
cultivation, intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver,—is
character.’ Character and self-reliance. ‘Trust thyself! every heart
vibrates to that iron string.’ And yet we have our being in a _not
ourselves_. ‘There is a power above and behind us, and we are the
channels of its communications.’ But our lives must be pitched higher.
‘Life must be lived on a higher plane; we must go up to a higher
platform, to which we are always invited to ascend; there the whole
scene changes.’ The good we need is for ever close to us, though we
attain it not. ‘On the brink of the waters of life and truth, we are
miserably dying.’ This good is close to us, moreover, in our daily life,
and in the familiar, homely places. ‘The unremitting retention of simple
and high sentiments in obscure duties,—that is the maxim for us. Let us
be poised and wise, and our own to-day. Let us treat the men and women
well,—treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are. Men live in
their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are too soft and tremulous for
successful labour. I settle myself ever firmer in the creed, that we
should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we
are, by whomsoever we deal with; accepting our actual companions and
circumstances, however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom
the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us. Massachusetts,
Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear
loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and if
we will tarry a little we may come to learn that here is best. See to it
only that thyself is here.’ Furthermore, the good is close to us _all_.
‘I resist the scepticism of our education and of our educated men. I do
not believe that the differences of opinion and character in men are
organic. I do not recognise, besides the class of the good and the wise,
a permanent class of sceptics, or a class of conservatives, or of
malignants, or of materialists. I do not believe in the classes. Every
man has a call of the power to do something unique.’ Exclusiveness is
deadly. ‘The exclusive in social life does not see that he excludes
himself from enjoyment in the attempt to appropriate it. The
exclusionist in religion does not see that he shuts the door of heaven
on himself in striving to shut out others. Treat men as pawns and
ninepins, and you shall suffer as well as they. If you leave out their
heart you shall lose your own: The selfish man suffers more from his
selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important
benefit.’ A sound nature will be inclined to refuse ease and
self-indulgence. ‘To live with some rigour of temperance, or some
extreme of generosity, seems to be an asceticism which common
good-nature would appoint to those who are at ease and in plenty, in
sign that they feel a brotherhood with the great multitude of suffering
men.’ Compensation, finally, is the great law of life; it is everywhere,
it is sure, and there is no escape from it. This is that ‘law alive and
beautiful, which works over our heads and under our feet. Pitiless, it
avails itself of our success when we obey it, and of our ruin when we
contravene it. We are all secret believers in it. It rewards actions
after their nature. The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
The thief steals from himself, the swindler swindles himself. You must
pay at last your own debt.’
This is tonic indeed! And let no one object that it is too general; that
more practical, positive direction is what we want; that Emerson’s
optimism, self-reliance, and indifference to favourable conditions for
our life and growth have in them something of danger. ‘Trust thyself;’
‘what attracts my attention shall have it;’ ‘though thou shouldst walk
the world over thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or
ignoble;’ ‘what we call vulgar society is that society whose poetry is
not yet written, but which you shall presently make as enviable and
renowned as any.’ With maxims like these, we surely, it may be said, run
some risk of being made too well satisfied with our own actual self and
state, however crude and imperfect they may be. ‘Trust thyself?’ It may
be said that the common American or Englishman is more than enough
disposed already to trust himself. I often reply, when our sectarians
are praised for following conscience: Our people are very good in
following their conscience; where they are not so good is in
ascertaining whether their conscience tells them right. ‘What attracts
my attention shall have it?’ Well, that is our people’s plea when they
run after the Salvation Army, and desire Messrs. Moody and Sankey. ‘Thou
shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble?’ But think
of the turn of the good people of our race for producing a life of
hideousness and immense ennui; think of that specimen of your own New
England life which Mr. Howells gives us in one of his charming stories
which I was reading lately; think of the life of that ragged New England
farm in the _Lady of the Aroostook_; think of Deacon Blood, and Aunt
Maria, and the straight-backed chairs with black horse-hair seats, and
Ezra Perkins with perfect self-reliance depositing his travellers in the
snow! I can truly say that in the little which I have seen of the life
of New England, I am more struck with what has been achieved than with
the crudeness and failure. But no doubt there is still a great deal of
crudeness also. Your own novelists say there is, and I suppose they say
true. In the New England, as in the Old, our people have to learn, I
suppose, not that their modes of life are beautiful and excellent
already; they have rather to learn that they must transform them.
To adopt this line of objection to Emerson’s deliverances would,
however, be unjust. In the first place, Emerson’s points are in
themselves true, if understood in a certain high sense; they are true
and fruitful. And the right work to be done, at the hour when he
appeared, was to affirm them generally and absolutely. Only thus could
he break through the hard and fast barrier of narrow, fixed ideas, which
he found confronting him, and win an entrance for new ideas. Had he
attempted developments which may now strike us as expedient, he would
have excited fierce antagonism, and probably effected little or nothing.
The time might come for doing other work later, but the work which
Emerson did was the right work to be done then.
In the second place, strong as was Emerson’s optimism, and unconquerable
as was his belief in a good result to emerge from all which he saw going
on around him, no misanthropical satirist ever saw shortcomings and
absurdities more clearly than he did, or exposed them more courageously.
When he sees ‘the meanness,’ as he calls it, ‘of American politics,’ he
congratulates Washington on being ‘long already happily dead,’ on being
‘wrapt in his shroud and for ever safe.’ With how firm a touch he
delineates the faults of your two great political parties of forty years
ago! The Democrats, he says, ‘have not at heart the ends which give to
the name of democracy what hope and virtue are in it. The spirit of our
American radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has
no ulterior and divine ends, but is destructive only out of hatred and
selfishness. On the other side, the conservative party, composed of the
most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid,
and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right, it aspires to
no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy. From
neither party, when in power, has the world any benefit to expect in
science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate with the resources of the
nation.’ Then with what subtle though kindly irony he follows the
gradual withdrawal in New England, in the last half century, of tender
consciences from the social organisations,—the bent for experiments
such as that of Brook Farm and the like,—follows it in all its
‘dissidence of dissent and Protestantism of the Protestant religion!’ He
even loves to rally the New Englander on his philanthropical activity,
and to find his beneficence and its institutions a bore! ‘Your
miscellaneous popular charities, the education at college of fools, the
building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many of these now
stand, alms to sots, and the thousand-fold relief societies,—though I
confess with shame that I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, yet it
is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to
withhold.’ ‘Our Sunday schools and churches and pauper societies are
yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody. There are natural
ways of arriving at the same ends at which these aim, but do not
arrive.’ ‘Nature does not like our benevolence or our learning much
better than she likes our frauds and wars. When we come out of the
caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition convention, or the Temperance
meeting, or the Transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says
to us: “So hot, my little sir?”’
Yes, truly, his insight is admirable; his truth is precious. Yet the
secret of his effect is not even in these; it is in his temper. It is in
the hopeful, serene, beautiful temper wherewith these, in Emerson, are
indissolubly joined; in which they work, and have their being. He says
himself: ‘We judge of a man’s wisdom by his hope, knowing that the
perception of the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth.’ If
this be so, how wise is Emerson! for never had man such a sense of the
inexhaustibleness of nature, and such hope. It was the ground of his
being; it never failed him. Even when he is sadly avowing the
imperfection of his literary power and resources, lamenting his fumbling
fingers and stammering tongue, he adds: ‘Yet, as I tell you, I am very
easy in my mind and never dream of suicide. My whole philosophy, which
is very real, teaches acquiescence and optimism. Sure I am that the
right word will be spoken, though I cut out my tongue.’ In his old age,
with friends dying and life failing, his tone of cheerful,
forward-looking hope is still the same. ‘A multitude of young men are
growing up here of high promise, and I compare gladly the social poverty
of my youth with the power on which these draw.’ His abiding word for
us, the word by which being dead he yet speaks to us, is this: ‘That
which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are, is
cheerfulness and courage, and the endeavour to realise our aspirations.
Shall not the heart, which has received so much, trust the Power by
which it lives?’
One can scarcely overrate the importance of thus holding fast to
happiness and hope. It gives to Emerson’s work an invaluable virtue. As
Wordsworth’s poetry is, in my judgment, the most important work done in
verse, in our language, during the present century, so Emerson’s
_Essays_ are, I think, the most important work done in prose. His work
is more important than Carlyle’s. Let us be just to Carlyle, provoking
though he often is. Not only has he that genius of his which makes
Emerson say truly of his letters, that ‘they savour always of eternity.’
More than this may be said of him. The scope and upshot of his teaching
are true; ‘his guiding genius,’ to quote Emerson again, is really ‘his
moral sense, his perception of the sole importance of truth and
justice.’ But consider Carlyle’s temper, as we have been considering
Emerson’s! take his own account of it! ‘Perhaps London is the proper
place for me after all, seeing all places are _im_proper: who knows?
Meanwhile, I lead a most dyspeptic, solitary, self-shrouded life;
consuming, if possible in silence, my considerable daily allotment of
pain; glad when any strength is left in me for writing, which is the
only use I can see in myself,—too rare a case of late. The ground of my
existence is black as death; too black, when all _void_ too; but at
times there paint themselves on it pictures of gold, and rainbow, and
lightning; all the brighter for the black ground, I suppose. Withal, I
am very much of a fool.’—No, not a fool, but turbid and morbid, wilful
and perverse. ‘We judge of a man’s wisdom by his hope.’
Carlyle’s perverse attitude towards happiness cuts him off from hope. He
fiercely attacks the desire for happiness; his grand point in _Sartor_,
his secret in which the soul may find rest, is that one shall cease to
desire happiness, that one should learn to say to oneself: ‘What if thou
wert born and predestined not to be happy, but to be unhappy!’ He is
wrong; Saint Augustine is the better philosopher, who says: ‘Act we
_must_ in pursuance of what gives us most delight.’ Epictetus and
Augustine can be severe moralists enough; but both of them know and
frankly say that the desire for happiness is the root and ground of
man’s being. Tell him and show him that he places his happiness wrong,
that he seeks for delight where delight will never be really found; then
you illumine and further him. But you only confuse him by telling him to
cease to desire happiness; and you will not tell him this unless you are
already confused yourself.
Carlyle preached the dignity of labour, the necessity of righteousness,
the love of veracity, the hatred of shams. He is said by many people to
be a great teacher, a great helper for us, because he does so. But what
is the due and eternal result of labour, righteousness,
veracity?—Happiness. And how are we drawn to them by one who, instead
of making us feel that with them is happiness, tells us that perhaps we
were predestined not to be happy but to be unhappy?
You will find, in especial, many earnest preachers of our popular
religion to be fervent in their praise and admiration of Carlyle. His
insistence on labour, righteousness, and veracity, pleases them; his
contempt for happiness pleases them too. I read the other day a tract
against smoking, although I do not happen to be a smoker myself.
‘Smoking,’ said the tract, ‘is liked because it gives agreeable
sensations. Now it is a positive objection to a thing that it gives
agreeable sensations. An earnest man will expressly avoid what gives
agreeable sensations.’ Shortly afterwards I was inspecting a school, and
I found the children reading a piece of poetry on the common theme that
we are here to-day and gone to-morrow. I shall soon be gone, the speaker
in this poem was made to say,—
‘And I shall be glad to go,
For the world at best is a dreary place,
And my life is getting low.’
How usual a language of popular religion that is, on our side of the
Atlantic at any rate! But then our popular religion, in disparaging
happiness here below, knows very well what it is after. It has its eye
on a happiness in a future life above the clouds, in the New Jerusalem,
to be won by disliking and rejecting happiness here on earth. And so
long as this ideal stands fast, it is very well. But for very many it
now stands fast no longer; for Carlyle, at any rate, it had failed and
vanished. Happiness in labour, righteousness, and veracity,—in the life
of the spirit,—here was a gospel still for Carlyle to preach, and to
help others by preaching. But he baffled them and himself by preferring
the paradox that we are not born for happiness at all.
Happiness in labour, righteousness, and veracity; in all the life of the
spirit; happiness and eternal hope;—that was Emerson’s gospel. I hear
it said that Emerson was too sanguine; that the actual generation in
America is not turning out so well as he expected. Very likely he was
too sanguine as to the near future; in this country it is difficult not
to be too sanguine. Very possibly the present generation may prove
unworthy of his high hopes; even several generations succeeding this may
prove unworthy of them. But by his conviction that in the life of the
spirit is happiness, and by his hope that this life of the spirit will
come more and more to be sanely understood, and to prevail, and to work
for happiness,—by this conviction and hope Emerson was great, and he
will surely prove in the end to have been right in them. In this country
it is difficult, as I said, not to be sanguine. Very many of your
writers are over-sanguine, and on the wrong grounds. But you have two
men who in what they have written show their sanguineness in a line
where courage and hope are just, where they are also infinitely
important, but where they are not easy. The two men are Franklin and
Emerson.[5] These two are, I think, the most distinctively and
honourably American of your writers; they are the most original and the
most valuable. Wise men everywhere know that we must keep up our courage
and hope; they know that hope is, as Wordsworth well says,—
‘The paramount _duty_ which Heaven lays,
For its own honour, on man’s suffering heart.’
But the very word _duty_ points to an effort and a struggle to maintain
our hope unbroken. Franklin and Emerson maintained theirs with a
convincing ease, an inspiring joy. Franklin’s confidence in the
happiness with which industry, honesty, and economy will crown the life
of this work-day world, is such that he runs over with felicity. With a
like felicity does Emerson run over, when he contemplates the happiness
eternally attached to the true life in the spirit. You cannot prize him
too much, nor heed him too diligently. He has lessons for both the
branches of our race. I figure him to my mind as visible upon earth
still, as still standing here by Boston Bay, or at his own Concord, in
his habit as he lived, but of heightened stature and shining feature,
with one hand stretched out towards the East, to our laden and labouring
England; the other towards the ever-growing West, to his own
dearly-loved America,—‘great, intelligent, sensual, avaricious
America.’ To us he shows for guidance his lucid freedom, his
cheerfulness and hope; to you his dignity, delicacy, serenity,
elevation.
THE END.
_Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh._
[Footnotes]
1. _Philippians_, iv, 8.
2. Ὅσα σεμνά.
3. _Ecclesiastes_, viii. 17.
4. _Iliad_, xxiv. 49.
5. I found with pleasure that this conjunction of Emerson’s name with
Franklin’s had already occurred to an accomplished writer and delightful
man, a friend of Emerson, left almost the sole survivor, alas! of the
famous literary generation of Boston,—Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Dr.
Holmes has kindly allowed me to print here the ingenious and interesting
lines, hitherto unpublished, in which he speaks of Emerson thus:—
‘Where in the realm of thought, whose air is song,
Does he, the Buddha of the West, belong?
He seems a wingéd Franklin, sweetly wise,
Born to unlock the secret of the skies;
And which the nobler calling—if ’tis fair
Terrestrial with celestial to compare—
To guide the storm-cloud’s elemental flame,
Or walk the chambers whence the lightning came
Amidst the sources of its subtile fire,
And steal their effluence for his lips and lyre?’